LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

• Oct 12, 2000

There you go again'no Macs
I want to comment on your product review 'Gigahertz chips give PCs super power' [GCN, Aug. 21, Page 41] by Michael Cheek and Carlos A. Soto. I think you made a grave error in excluding the Apple G4 Altivec chip, which is banned from export to sensitive countries such as Russia, Iraq and Cuba because these computers are in the supercomputer class.

None of the Pentiums or Athlons is in this class.

And don't give me the 'we're-only-comparing-Windows- varieties-of-chips' argument. A thorough article would have included the fastest desktop chips, the Apple G4 chips.

Could this article be considered the beginning of a new comic book series?

Michael Houda

Senior engineering technician

Public Works Department, Design and Construction Division

San Jose, Calif.


Hey, get with it

The bio on John McCormick's Power User column reads: 'John McCormick, a free-lance writer and computer consultant, has been working with computers since the early 1960s.'

Well, so have I. And I will use that fact to exclaim that McCormick ought to come out of the 1960s or '70s or whatever decade he's stuck in and get with the program.

I quote from his column, 'Users on the road can take shortcuts for Office 2000 apps': 'But I still have complaints about Outlook. Foremost is the fact that common tasks such as opening an e-mail (Ctrl-Shift-M), opening the address book (Ctrl-Shift-B), opening an appointment (Ctrl-Shift-A) and opening a contact (Ctrl-Shift-C) all require three-finger keyboard action [GCN, Sept 4, Page 33].'

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Good heavens. Yes, they do! But who cares? I surely don't. I figured out how to use a mouse'a long, long time ago. And yes, I really disliked losing all of my hard-learned WordStar 4 key sequence commands. But I did lose them, and I'm better for it.

My computer is a tool; it's a much better tool with a mouse. I don't need to perpetrate an archaic set of arcane key sequence commands on any user when the mouse is always available.

Gerry Cramm

Principal computer analyst

Litton PRC

San Diego